


A lonely company

by Azzandra



Category: The Arcana (Visual Novel)
Genre: Before the plague, F/M, First Meetings, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-13
Updated: 2019-08-13
Packaged: 2020-08-20 20:42:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,980
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20234059
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Azzandra/pseuds/Azzandra
Summary: "Hey, how about I read your fortune instead?" she asked, and with a flick of the wrist, fanned out her own deck of cards."Those are playing cards," he pointed out, a bit coolly."Well, of course they are," she said, her grin growing sharp. "You don'tdicewith fate."





	A lonely company

* * *

_You be the moon, I'll be the earth_  
_And when we burst_  
_Start over _  
_oh darling_  
_Begin again_  
_Begin again_  
_Begin again_

_\--"**begin again**" by Purity Ring_

* * *

She'd tell him later that she ended in his tent by accident, turned around by the press of the crowd. She dropped down into the chair before him with an insouciant grin; pied coat with foxfur collar, and no mask despite the Masquerade roaring around them. 

"Hey, how about I read your fortune instead?" she asked, and with a flick of the wrist, fanned out her own deck of cards.

Asra's mouth fell open, his usual spiel still on the tip of his tongue, because this was not how things were supposed to go. Then he slowly closed his mouth and composed himself before addressing the situation.

"Those are playing cards," he pointed out, a bit coolly.

"Well, of course they are," she said, her grin growing sharp. "You don't dice with fate."

"Hm." His eyes went half-lidded and out of focus as he took in her aura instead of her appearance. A swirl of earth-tones, but streaked with vibrant greens; turquoise, teals; a terracotta red the deeper he looked, blushing into sienna. Her eyes were glinting yellow, not like fire, but like amber. 

"If you're not interested in your fortune--" he began.

"Oh, who says I'm not?" she asked distractedly, as she shuffled her deck of playing cards. They were old and yellowed, greasy like the cheap decks sailors played with. But a well-loved deck, like an old friend. Hedge tarot, like old ladies without magic used. Curious from someone who actually felt like a magician. Her magic had a soft press to it, like clay or loamy earth. Had she never learned the proper tarot?

"--If you're not interested in me reading your fortune, how about a mask?" he persisted, pointing to the selection he had for sale. He was proud of them. Both he and Muriel had worked hard to produce them for the Masquerade.

Her eyes flicked to the masks, but only for a moment. She put down a three-card spread. 

"Let's let the cards decide if I buy one," she said.

Asra gave a huff of laughter at this. He leaned forward in his seat--a rickety little foot stool, but he worked with what he had--and let intuition guide his choices.

"This one," he said without thinking.

She flipped it. Seven of manacles. He tried to mentally map what this card would correspond to in a proper deck, but he wasn't sure that was possible. For one, the playing cards were diagonally symmetrical, making it impossible to distinguish between upright or reversed meaning. For another, tarot and playing cards used wildly different suits. 

She had to have her own interpretation for each card of the deck, or maybe it was more like other kinds of divination; like Muriel's runes, more than like Asra's tarot.

"Oh, yes, that one," she cackled. "The past. Interesting. Okay, next one. The present."

It seemed she wasn't going to tell him the interpretation at all! He'd have asked for his money back, had he pain anything for this reading.

Asra tapped the next card, and she flipped it over.

Ace of scepters. 

Her eyebrows rose up, and then lowered again as her grin reappeared.

"Interesting," she said. "Alright, yeah, I can see it. Last one. The future."

Asra did the honors this time, and flipped it over. It was the Jester--a wildcard. It bore some passing resemblance to the Fool in a tarot deck, but he wasn't certain it would have the same interpretation.

This time she leaned over actually surprised. Her aura swirled a deep purple, like the darkness that lines storm clouds when they were pregnant with lightning. She wasn't all earth tones, then.

"I could've sworn I took that one out," she muttered, and looked askance at her deck.

"So what's my fate, O teller of fortunes?" Asra asked, leaning his chin on a fist as he watched her pick through her deck of cards in search of the other Jester.

"That reading was for me, actually," she said. 

"Oh." He did not sound disappointed, he was sure he didn't. But, well, might as well get something out of this anyway-- "So what's the verdict on the mask?"

She gathered up her cards then, and rose to look at the masks hanging on the board nearby. She inspected each one for a long while, before settling on the one of the wild dog, cream and gold and spotted black, eyes lined as though with kohl, its expression too serious to suit her.

She took it off its hook, inspecting the irregular black spots along its forehead.

"You do good work," she said.

"How do you know I made it?" he returned, quirking an eyebrow.

She leaned forward, plucking his hand off the table, and for some strange reason, it didn't even occur to him to pull it back. She spread his fingers and placed them against the surface of the mask, and the black spots were a perfect match for his fingerprints--he'd forgone a brush and made them with his bare hands.

"I know now," she said, releasing his hand. 

She placed the mask on her face. It did not match the coat she wore--the garment was checkered in a myriad of colors, like a quilt, and the foxfur color did not match any of the colors of the mask. But everything she wore was mismatched anyway, and so it fit. "What's your name?" she asked, lingering at the mouth of his tent.

"Asra. What's yours?"

She grinned at him, but then she told him.

* * *

He would not learn she worked at the magic shop until weeks later, and when he did, he felt he would have been perfectly justified in finding the entire thing infuriating.

Along the years, to keep food in their bellies, Asra and Muriel had found an assortment of odd jobs and small tasks they would do for the various residents of Vesuvia in exchange for money. Tarot readings alone did not pay unless there was reliable foot traffic to bring customers, and Asra had been chased off from the prime locales by more brazen magicians and city guards both.

But one of the small jobs he'd always relied on was foraging ingredients in the forest outside Vesuvia for Old Woman Jackdee who ran the magic shop. It wasn't a terribly difficult job, and he even enjoyed it. So once a week he'd drop in, and ask if she needed anything.

Some weeks she'd wave him off, explaining she had everything she needed. But most of the times, she sent him off with an entire list of things to find for her, and Asra would oblige, and then she'd give him his pay and insist he stay for tea, and sometimes even supper. If Jackdee felt generous, she would even send him off with packed leftovers for Muriel.

So it was with some disappointment that Asra found himself dismissed by Jackdee for two months running.

"My niece Sylvie, she goes into the forest for me," Jackdee explained. "Oh, she's been such a godsend, helping around the shop."

Asra was dismayed about being supplanted like this, but he could hardly fault Jackdee or her niece. The truth was that the old woman was getting on in years, and though her bad hips prevented her from foraging the forest herself, it was her failing memory that was going to send the magic shop under, unless someone helped her out on her forgetful days.

Then he heard the door behind him, and saw Jackdee's face light up in recognition at the new arrival.

"Oh, Sylvie, there you are! I was just talking about you!" Jackdee said.

And Asra turned around, and even without the mask he had sold her, he recognized the woman who had most definitely not introduced herself as Sylvie when they'd met.

"Hello, auntie," she greeted with her coyote grin, her eyes on Asra the entire time.

* * *

When it was too hot for her pied coat with the foxfur collar, she wore a loose linen shirt, embroidered with flowers along the collar, and a red sash around her waist, and a pair of loose turquoise trousers, with geometric patterns picked out in red thread along the seams. Zinnia flowers in her hair, maintained fresh and dewy by her spells. Kohl around her eyes, smeared almost carelessly, so she looked like she had bags under her eyes even when she didn't.

This was the image of her that Asra would affix in his mind, even when she started wearing skirts and shawls later on, even when she stopped wearing flowers in her hair, and started tying it back in colorful patterned scarves.

This was how she looked when she boldly strode in like she belonged, sunlit from behind, the shadows of the shop rising cool and protective around her.

"Sylvie, huh?" Asra asked, once Jackdee was out of earshot.

She went behind the counter, adjusting something inside the glass display.

"That's not my name," she said.

"Your aunt said it was."

"That's not my aunt, either."

Asra blinked. "...What?" 

Her aura was warm and bright that day, gold and red like different types of desert sand. 

"Jackdee's just a bit confused," she explained. "It's a thing that happens to old people. They start losing their memories, and confusing people they meet with people they knew once."

"But then, who are you?" Asra blurted.

She wouldn't answer right away, because Jackdee chose that moment to bustle back into the room.

* * *

Over time, she would tell him innumerable stories of who she was.

She'd tell him of the time she'd been a potter's apprentice, and she'd managed to break every pot meant for an olive oil merchant, and then sat all night making new pots, and then run off in the morning because she decided she was too clumsy for pottery anyway.

She'd tell him of when she'd been an animal wrangler's assistant, and had had to promptly leave town in the dead of night because she'd had a disagreement about animal welfare with the baron who owned the local menagerie, and had maybe forgotten to lock the panther enclosure, and if anyone had been eaten, it had only been the people who'd had it coming.

She'd tell him of how she'd been a hairdresser's apprentice, and managed to gossip so fervently that she might have started a minor blood feud between two up and coming socialites in a city far away. Nobody had died in the resulting duel, thankfully, though one of the ladies had gotten an aesthetically pleasing scar out of the incident.

She'd tell him about the time she'd briefly been hired as a gaoler, and if the menagerie thing had been any indication on her feelings about keeping living things in cages, then she really should have known from the start how that job was going to end; she still had a bounty on her head from that ordeal, though the posters had a very poor likeness of her. They never could get her nose right in the etchings.

She had a hundred cockamamie tales about all the failed apprenticeships and the botched jobs she'd gotten while traveling from wherever she was from to wherever she ended up. Asra shouldn't have believed half; yet he believed all of them. 

Her hands were rough and calloused, and she had a thousand little skills. She was always only passable at whatever task she tried, whether it was sewing, or carpentry, or baking. But oh, how many things she'd try anyway. How many tools her hands knew how to hold. How many small domestic secrets she would impart to him. 

All the dances she knew the steps to, and how she would forget the steps anyway, and make up for what she lacked in discipline with stamina--all night long she could dance, just twirling and twirling, arms thrown out and a glow of sweat on her skin.

And when she sang, it was beautiful.

* * *

He tried to teach her how to do proper Tarot readings, before the plague and before her-- 

Before.

She'd been terrible at it, at odds with his deck.

"Too much personality," she proclaimed, handing him back the deck. "We don't get along. I'll stick to my cards, they're sweeter to me."

It was infuriating, in some ways. Apparently in something like a decade of travel across two continents, the only thing she _hadn't_ apprenticed in was magic. She had learned it all by instinct, and trial and error, and had used it only for the most practical of reasons. As a magician, she was ruthlessly pragmatic, and that did not always suit Asra's style.

But when they would go into the forest together, to gather ingredients, he could see the way the world around her bent to her magic, like a sunflower towards the sun.

"I always love big cities," she would say. "Because in small towns, villages, stuff like that--you screw up once, and you have to run to the next one over to get away from your mistakes. Cities, though--you can reinvent yourself just by walking to the next street over, if you know what you're doing."

She could talk at length about her love of cities. But the forest was the one that came out to meet her. Flowers bloomed for her; streams babbled merrily. Shy animals poked their heads out, more than Asra had ever seen on his walks through this very same forest.

Faust liked her greatly, so he ought not to have been surprised. If his affinity was for water and dreams, hers was for earth and nature. Solid things, real things; things with claws and teeth, and things of root and rock. Wild and grounded, both at once. That was her.

She knelt by a blackened rock, and rubbed her fingers through the ashes.

"There's a salamander nearby," she said, giving him a lopsided grin. "You know, I used to apprentice for a baker who swore by salamanders in all his ovens. Used to make this bread with a nut paste filling--ah, I should get one for auntie, she's too old to be hauling firewood every time she wants to put the kettle on."

"Salamanders aren't the most friendly creatures," he pointed out to her.

"Oh, I assure you," she said, her eyes glinting in the dappled sunlight, "I may not look it, but I can be very charming when I want to."

* * *

She couldn't be older than Muriel--perhaps three or four years older than Asra himself, though it was hard to tell by her face--but she had wandered far, and done many things, even if she'd done some of those things poorly.

It made him yearn for places far away, but in those days, he still found himself tethered to Vesuvia, afraid that if he left, she might be gone by the time he returned.

It was an ironic fear. The one time he had left Vesuvia without this fear in his breast had been during the red plague.

"Asra," she'd said before he left, with an incredulous huff of laughter at his assumptions, "I can't come with you! I'm staying to help. I already apprenticed myself to one of the plague doctors."

The fight they'd had then had been an ugly thing, and they had dug claws into each other, one more viciously than the other. Asra had stormed out, and she had slammed the door behind him, and neither had apologized. Neither had thought they should. Neither ever would.

He'd been so sure she would be there to snub for an apology once he cooled off and returned, and that had been the one time he'd been wrong.

* * *

The first time he'd truly feared she would leave was when Jackdee died.

Old Woman Jackdee was ancient, and had been rickety-old since Asra was still a child, so her passing was not altogether a surprise. But he had perhaps not noticed how frail she'd gotten in the past years. He'd not taken special note of how her 'niece' doted on her, and had taken over so many tasks that the woman found difficult to accomplish anymore. He'd not noticed who kept the ledgers, and set up the wards, and tallied inventory, and swept the shop, and so he had not been aware of just how much Jackdee was not capable of doing those things anymore.

But the day he showed up at the shop and found her sitting on the steps with a bundle of herbs on her lap and a stick of incense in her hands, he realized something had shifted.

"Auntie's dead," she informed him with a strangely blank expression. "Shop's closed today."

"Of course," Asra said, shifting awkwardly from one foot to the other. "Do you... need help?"

She shook her head. "I'm making arrangements. It's fine." And then, quieter, as if reassuring herself, "It's fine."

She'd made arrangements indeed, with a local temple. Jackdee was cremated, and her remains placed in an urn within the crypts of a goddess she'd worshiped in life. Asra had not known Jackdee to be religious, though evidently a fake niece was more privy to such facts than an old acquaintance.

The shop was closed for a week.

And then it opened again, and that was when he knew she'd stay.

She was right when she spoke of the city as a place to reinvent oneself. She had not needed to run very far at all, to change from doting niece to friendly magic shop owner. She'd stayed herself the entire time.

And oh, how good she was at that, staying herself even when she changed so much. He would always be thankful for that.


End file.
